Mission Briefing
This project is one big experiment. A retro real-time strategy game of fleet command and discovery. Rendered entirely as a radar scope: green phosphor, scanlines, and the dark, cold void waiting to be explored.
Void Galactica is a retro real-time strategy game of exploration and fleet command. You are the last commander of a dying frontier station, sending probes and scouts into sectors the galaxy gave up on, building outposts on what they find, and defending every supply line in real time. The galaxy underneath keeps score of everything you do.
The project started as a weekend prototype: one map, one mining group, one looping FM-synth track. The prototype refused to stay small. Now it's in full production with a playable core loop of explore, expand, engage, salvage, plus a devlog documenting every system as it comes online.
The aesthetic north star is 1980s military terminals: green phosphor CRTs, tactical grids, and interfaces designed to be read at a glance in the dark. If a screen in the game wouldn't look at home in an ops room from 1984, it gets redesigned.
| Status | Early proof of concept |
| Genre | Real-time strategy / exploration |
| Platform | PC and Mac. No consoles. |
| Engine | Godot 4.7, GDScript |
| Team | One man for now, one obsession |
| Release | Who knows. Follow the devlog. |
The Rules We Build By
Readable At A Glance
Every unit, resource, and threat must be identifiable in under a quarter second on a full tactical map. If it needs a tooltip, it's cut.
Cutscenes Like Recovered Footage
The story is told by the map — and by short dithered reels, grainy as recovered ship logs, when a moment earns one. Factions remember, outposts fall or thrive, and the simulation never stops for a scene.
Ship It Honest
The devlog shows real builds, real bugs, and real numbers. No vertical-slice theater. What you see is what compiles.
People Make Awesome Things!
The look of this project stands on a couple of great sources. What follows is what I supported myself with, who made it, and under what terms. The game ships a fuller list on its own credits screen.
Engine
| Godot Engine | Everything the game runs on — MIT |
Shaders
| cool-retro-term |
The CRT phosphor pass and the burn-in behind every screen, ported
from
cool-retro-term
by Filippo Scognamiglio (Swordfish90), © 2013-2021. The
burn-in accumulator derives from its burn_in.frag.
— GPLv3
|
| Starfield Parallax | Reworked into the radar starfield. GodotShaders — MIT |
| VHS | Tape wobble on the archive footage. GodotShaders — CC0 |
| 2D Sun with Coronal Flares | The star itself. sidigrid, via GodotShaders, adapted for the far-zoom crossfade — CC0 |
| Dither Gradient | The dither on every lit planet. SamBigos, on tromero's BayerMatrix, via GodotShaders — MIT |
Fonts
| ModeNine | Body copy here and in the game. Grudnuk Creations, © 1998 Andrew C. Bulhak and © 2001 Graham H Freeman, after Bulhak's ModeSeven, itself after the BBC Micro. Freely distributable, and its readme travels with the font as its terms ask. |
| Pixel Operator | Every terminal-voiced line: headings, labels, the nav. Jayvee Enaguas (HarvettFox96) — CC0 1.0 |
| Lilliput Steps | Ray Larabie, Typodermic Fonts — CC0 1.0 |
| VT323 | The fallback when the pixel faces have not loaded. Peter Hull, drawn from the glyphs of a DEC VT320 terminal, served by Google Fonts — SIL Open Font License 1.1 |
Textures
| Planet & moon maps | Solar System Scope — CC BY 4.0 |
| Named moons & Pluto | NASA 3D Resources, NASA / USGS / JPL-Caltech mosaics from Voyager, Galileo, Cassini and New Horizons — public domain |
| Minor bodies | Probe mosaics of Bennu, Ryugu, Itokawa, Eros, Vesta and others via Celestia Content — CC BY 4.0 |
| Asteroid surfaces | ambientCG — CC0 1.0 |
Icons
| Pixelarticons | The layout switch and the step arrows on the devlog. Gerrit Halfmann — MIT |
Astronomical data
| Planet orbits | Keplerian elements for approximate positions of the major planets, E.M. Standish, JPL — public |
| Small bodies & moons | JPL Small-Body Database and JPL Horizons, courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech Solar System Dynamics |
| Menu starfield | Real stars to magnitude 4, from the Yale Bright Star Catalog — public |
| Earth relief | The main-menu globe, derived from NOAA ETOPO 2022 bedrock elevation — public domain |